If you have built yourself an HTPC then you have also built yourself a machine which is relatively good at transcoding video if you get the right software. Not only can you watch movies, you can edit or manipulate your own movies. The Tech Report delves into the current state of both hardware and software transcoding tools in their recent article. They check out the performance of Cyberlink's MediaEspresso, ArcSoft MediaConverter and Handbrake on an Intel based system using the native GPU on the chip as well as tossing in AMD and NVIDIA GPUs to see how it changes the performance.

"The market is rife with hardware video transcoders and software that can take advantage of them. However, making sense of that jungle of disparate offerings can be tough. We've tried to make sense of it all, comparing the latest transcoding logic from AMD, Nvidia, and Intel in three major video conversion applications."